inkbluesky

Luxury Grub

Can you spare a tear for the ultra-rich? One week after achieving the Guinness World record for the world’s most expensive dessert–a $25,000 “Frozen Haute Chocolate” containing five grams of edible 23-karat gold–the New York restaurant Serendipity 3 was shut down by the health department. It turns out that in addition to truffle shavings and other Haute Chocolate ingredients, the restaurant’s kitchen contained “a live mouse, mouse droppings in multiple areas of the restaurant, fruit flies, house flies, and more than 100 live cockroaches,” according to the inspectors.

One of those odd article that takes a breezy tone to make a larger point. Whether you’re rich or poor or somewhere in between you shop for food and eat out occasionally. Those upscale restaurants and specialty food stores start with the same ingredients as places with less “haute” appeal, frequently prepared by people that can’t afford to buy it and the cockroaches don’t have a prejudice for upscale eateries or Joe’s Dinner. At least one clear instance where envy isn’t worth the effort.

corn palace south dakota. this is a real place, a local facility used for concerts and events located in  Mitchell, South Dakota, population 15,000. every year or so they have an artist change the murals.

Jogaila (1362–1434) was the last pagan king of King of Poland. Though when he was about 24 he converted to Christianity. Partly so they he could marry the twelve year old Queen Jadwiga of Poland and was also adopted by his child bride’s mother in a kind of power play necessary to retain the throne should his wife die.

Can biology do better than faith?

In all of the history of science, only one other disparity of comparable magnitude to evolution has occurred between a scientific event and the impact it has had on the public mind. This was the discovery by Copernicus that Earth, and therefore humanity, is not the centre of the universe, and the universe is not a closed spherical bubble. Copernicus delayed publication of his master work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until the year of his death (1543). For his extension of the idea, Bruno was burned at the stake, and for its documentation Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and remained under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

Today we live in a less barbaric age, but an otherwise comparable disjunction between science and religion still roils the public mind. Why does such intense and pervasive resistance to evolution continue 150 years after the publication of On The Origin of Species, and in the teeth of the overwhelming accumulated evidence favouring it? The answer is simply that the Darwinian revolution, even more than the Copernican revolution, challenges the prehistoric and still-regnant self-image of humanity.

Wilson thinks the gap between religion and science cannot be mended in a way that brings them together. On the contrary, I agree the gap in widening. What Wilson and others call scientific humanism doesn’t offer, on the urgent primal level that religion does anyway an answer to mankind’s anxiety about death. Death and well, sex motivate everything we do directly or indirectly. While myths about swtiching from this worldly conscientious to other worldly offer some solace in a frequently harsh world we pay a price for promises of eternal life in the here and now,

The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote…

winter dreams wallpaper 

LookyBook has some flash based children’s books such as Enemy Pie, Sparkle and Spin, First Snow and the classic Little Red Riding Hood that you can flip through. The print isn’t big enough to read ( at least I couldn’t figure out how to make them readable), but the illustrations look great. I think the idea is that the kids get a preview of the characters and then you can order a dead tree version. The site also provides some nice inspiration for illustrators and graphic artists.

“Just don’t talk about your scars. It makes you sound like a sea captain” - Regina’s ( Jean Smart) advice to her daughter Samantha (Christina Applegate) on Samatha Who?

london at night 

Why the warmongering geniuses like Charles Krauthammer just don’t get 

    “If we do not learn to regard a war, and the separate campaigns of which it is composed, as a chain of linked engagements each leading to the next, but instead succumb to the idea that the capture of certain geographical points or the seizure of undefended provinces are of value in themselves, we are liable to regard them as windfall profits.” -19th century Prussian general and philosopher Carl von Clausewitz.

At some point wars end in political solutions or something resembling genocide. That so many armchair warriors think its all about the killing might, as Commander Huber suggests read some Clausewitz.

Swedish officials approve giant moose 

Northern Sweden officials have given the go-ahead for developers to construct a 148-foot-tall restaurant and concert hall shaped like a giant moose.

Are they going to call it the Bullwinkle. No, they’re going to call it The Stoom or The Big One in English. Make up your own joke.

“the seductive delights of caffeine”

It is said that around the seventh century, somewhere near the Red Sea - whether it was Ethiopia or Yemen is a subject of debate - a herd of goats ate the magenta berries of a local shrub and began to act strangely. In a classic 1935 study called Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity, the German journalist Heinrich Eduard Jacob described their behavior thus:

All night, for five nights in succession - nay, for seven or eight - they clambered over rocks, cutting capers, chasing one another, bleating fantastically. They turned their bearded heads hither and thither; with reddened eyes they gamboled convulsively when they caught sight of the goatherds, and then they darted off swift as arrows speeding from the bow.

Having observed the frisky goats, the imam of a nearby monastery - a sort of medieval Carlos Castaneda - roasted the berries in a chafing dish, crushed them in a mortar, mixed them with boiling water, and drank the brew. When he lay down, he couldn’t sleep. His heartbeat quickened, his limbs felt light, his mood became cheerful and alert. “He was not merely thinking,” wrote Jacob. “His thoughts had become concretely visible. He watched them from the right side and from the left, from above and from below. They raced like a team of horses.” The imam found that he could juggle a dozen ideas in the time it normally took to consider a single one.

digital ricepaper

Zealotry is nothing new in America, Carrie Nation

Between 1900 and 1910 she was arrested some 30 times after leading her followers in the destruction of one water hole after another with cries of “Smash, ladies, smash!” Prize-fighter John L. Sullivan was reported to have run and hid when Nation burst into his New York City saloon. Self-righteous and formidable, Nation mocked her opponents as “rum-soaked, whiskey-swilled, saturn-faced rummies.”

Probably a disservice to remember her as just a hell raising Prohibitionist as she was also involved in improving public health services and promoting world peace.